The following open access article in Insights: the UKSG journal, written by Dr. Mercedes Bunz, Director of the Hybrid Publishing Lab at the Centre for Digital Cultures (Leuphana University), evaluates the current state of academic book publishing based on the findings of the Hybrid Publishing Lab’s business model research. Continue Reading…

Hybrid Publishing Lab of the Centre for Digital Cultures in Lüneburg hosted the first workshop on Simondon in Germany. The workshop titled Simondon and Digital Culture hold on the 21st and 22nd of November 2013. The workshop attracted 50 participants from Germany, France, Britain, Swiss, etc. Attendees from the Hybrid Publishing Lab included Mercedes Bunz, Marcus Burkhardt, Yuk Hui, Andreas Kirchner. The audio proceedings can be find here, the CDC Press of the Hybrid Publishing Lab will follow up with the paper proceedings in 2014.

The meltdown of the financial market in 2008 started to provoke a new way of looking at machine, under the title of “Market: Rage against the machine”, the journalists analysed how the market could be further ruined by machines in addition to its own disruption. Financial workers are not factory workers who dared in the old days to propose sabotage of machines. But the rage against machines are increasingly significant, the reporters wrote: “What frightens investors most is a sudden evaporation of liquidity, when everyone pulls back at once and there is no one to provide a firm price to an investor wanting to sell. In 1987, investors accused some market makers of not answering their phones so that they would not have to buy shares from panicking sellers. Today, human market makers have largely been replaced by ultra-fast computer systems trading with high frequency. But like the human traders of yesterday, the machines can and do back away if markets are disrupted.1”

In this example, we do not only see protocols – that is in someway invisible behind the screen and the ecstasy of gambling in a global scale, but also standards – how trading is implemented globally by connecting different machines with different protocols and social norms – usages, distrust, rage, habits of not picking up phones when getting grumpy, body gesture of starring at the display of stock prices.The understanding of protocols in current media theories is more or less based on Alexandre Galloway’s book Protocol: control after decentralisation (2004) which excellently illustrates how network protocols embed different forms of control. The common take on Galloway always see protocol as agreement or diplomacy of communication, this understanding is unfortunately very limited. During the Hyperkult 2013 with the theme Standards, Norms and Protocols, it is also an occasion to revisit the question of protocols. To think about protocol as a mean of control is now evident, but in order to understand protocol, it is necessary to talk together with norms and standards. Continue Reading…

There is evidence which clearly indicates that Open Access (OA) has entered mainstream discourse. Open access can work in the immediate and short term in providing better access to the research literature, whilst some of the longer term consequences and effects are still emerging. But is this just for rich contries?

The old publishing system we have inherited from the 20th century, has marginalized research from developing countries. With Open Access there are new opportunities and possibilities and this gives also new hope for academic publishing in the developing world. Yet, in the developing world context there remain specific challenges and untapped opportunities for OA. The African Commons Project now has published a positioning paper on “Open Access and Development: Journals and beyond” (PDF). This report sets out to explore the current and potential uses of open access in the context of the developing world and how OA can be used to redress some of the imbalances, which currently exist within the traditional models of scholarly communication.

Note: If you want tp take part in the discussions on OA in the developing world aimed at world critical thinkers, activists and academics by the UNESCO’s Knowledge Communitiy, you can Register for the online discussions on the UNESCO’s WSIS Open Access Knowledge Communitiy Forum. The first debate with the topic “Production, publication and consumption of scholarly knowledge and OA.” will kick off on Tuesday, 27 November 2012.